In many different areas, it is desirable to maintain careful records of an activity. For example, an inventor may keep an inventor's notebook which documents when and how an inventor conceived of an idea and how he reduced that idea to practice. This type of record is often kept in a bound notebook where witness' statements may be placed including notarized documents and the like. All of this greatly increases the credibility these records would have in the event an inventor was required to prove his date of invention and his activities toward perfecting his invention in some administrative or court proceeding that may be questioning his right to a patent for his invention. Additionally, it is desirable to keep maintenance records for many types of equipment. For example, one will often see a used car advertised with the notation that the owner has “all the maintenance records”. In a similar fashion, maintenance logs are kept for boats, industrial equipment like earth-moving equipment and other expensive machinery. An owner who can clearly document appropriate preventative maintenance can sell used equipment of this type at a premium over a seller who does have these kinds of records.
A specialized area of this type of record keeping is found in the general aircraft industry. Maintenance log books are required by the Federal Aviation Administration for an aircraft engine or engines, the air frame, the prop or props, and the avionics. These records are often kept in a bound log book or in a format with consecutively numbered pages. When maintenance is performed by an aircraft and power plant mechanic, ordinarily licensed by the FAA, this mechanic is required to make a log book entry of what maintenance was performed and sign every entry with his name and license number. This constitutes a permanent record of the maintenance performed on the plane, which is necessary for the plane to be deemed air-worthy, hence, legal to fly. When the FAA determines there is a safety issue for a particular aircraft or specific engine type, they will issue an air-worthiness directive. The aircraft owners are then required to have a certified mechanic check the aircraft for compliance with this air-worthiness directive and then record in the log book that the air-worthiness directive has been completed. In order for the aircraft to be continually deemed air-worthy, there must be written records that show compliance with all air-worthiness directives. If there is no written record, then the air-worthiness directive work must be done again in order for the plane to be deemed air-worthy. Over the life of a complex aircraft it is not uncommon to have multiple air-worthiness directories, sometimes numbering as high as 50, for which compliance must be shown. By the same token, an aircraft pilot must maintain a log book of the amount of times and the circumstances where he or she is acquiring flying experience. One must have a certain amount of current flying time in order to be appropriately licensed to operate a plane.
In a like fashion, hospitals are required to keep charts recording the medical records for a patient during a hospital stay. These hospital charts have to be kept in compliance with standards imposed on the hospital by accrediting agents like the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Hospitals. A hospital that does not keep and maintain medical records or charts on patients to the appropriate standards can lose their accreditation.
When a bound record keeping book is used, then records are entered by hand into the record book. This creates many problems. First, handwritten entries are difficult to read. Second, log books can be lost. For aircraft applications, if the maintenance log book is lost, it can reduce the re-sale price of an aircraft by as much as 15%. Moreover, lost log books may require expensive reduplication of work to comply with aircraft directives which have already been performed in the past but for which no documentation exists if a log book is lost. Third, paper log books, even if carefully kept in bound notebooks, can be altered. In a malpractice claim against a hospital, an altered medical chart can be disastrous because it implies guilty knowledge on the part of the hospital. By the same token, there could be residual doubt in a purchaser of a used airplane or other piece of expensive equipment that the log books accurately reflect what has been done on the plane or other equipment. There is a fear there could be forged entries or altered entries.
Consequently, there is a need for properly maintained, legible, and unalterable records. There is a specific need in the field of aircraft maintenance logs and pilot logs. Such unalterable records can be useful for maintaining records on boats, expensive automobiles, for medical records, or anywhere there is a premium on accurately kept and maintained records with independent verification of the records.
It has been widely recognized that electronic monitoring of maintenance needs can be helpful. For example, Bazarnik, U.S. Pat. No. 4,404,641, discloses a maintenance monitor that alerts one that equipment is due for a particular type of maintenance. Chapin, Jr., U.S. Pat. No. 5,931,878, discloses a computerized prompting system that informs a user that a scheduled maintenance is due to be performed at a selective date. It is contemplated that there could be a connection to a network, specifically the Internet, between a service system and the database whereby a server could send updates from manufacturers to a service system or client system. Nguyen et al., U.S. Pat. No. 6,003,808, provides a maintenance and warranty control system for an aircraft. Here, an onboard engine performance monitoring computer uses a fault code as part of an HTML address. Maintenance actions are automatically recorded for validating or generating warranty claim applications.
In the aircraft maintenance field, some aircraft manufacturers or technical publishers provide computerized engine and air maintenance systems that provide for electronic record keeping and information management. Examples of this type of system are seen in the Sandifer, U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,778,381 and 5,987,474. Disclosed in these patents is a computer based apparatus and method to provide access to complex technical information employed to maintain and repair complicated equipment such as aircraft. This system provides a central source for aircraft technical information which is periodically updated. The Sandifer inventions provide a maintenance and repair information system based on a database of aircraft technical information used on a CD-ROM based computer system. This allows such browsing and search capabilities as are common on CD-ROM based information systems. These inventions also allow a log book to be kept as part of use of the system. This system anticipates that an aircraft owner may wish to gain access to the information on his home computer remotely through a telephone connection.
Despite this earlier work there is still a need to facilitate keeping of accurate, legible, and unalterable maintenance records for aircraft or other types of records that require that records be scrupulously and accurately kept in a form that reduces the possibility of alteration or spoilation. To this end, it is recognized that a recent technological development commonly called the “Internet” can be used to facilitate accurate and unalterable records.
Roughly speaking, the Internet is a large number of computers and computer networks that are interconnected all to each other through various types of communication links. These interconnected computers can be used by a user to exchange information with someone at a far removed computer using various programs to facilitate the exchange of the information. These programs include such things as electronic mail (e-mail), gopher, and the World Wide Web (WWW). The World Wide Web service allows a computer system, usually called a web server or web site, to send web pages of information to a remote client receiving computer system. These web pages usually contain graphical as well as text based information and may have links to other web pages or other web sites. Every site on the World Wide Web is uniquely identifiable by a uniform resource locator (URL). Thus, if a user with a client computer wishes to view a particular worldwide web page, then that user will type in or otherwise input the URL for the desired web page m a request. This type of request is usually called a HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP). The client computer is ordinarily linked to the Internet through an Internet service provider, which maintains resources and programs to take the client computer request (HTTP request) which is then forwarded to the web server that supports the web page specified by the URL. When the web server receives the request, it sends information to the client computer system that allows the client computer system to reconstruct the web page and display it using a particular program usually called a browser. A browser is a special purpose or special type of application program that facilitates requesting web pages and displaying of web pages on the computer that is running that browser program.
Currently, web pages are constructed using HyperText mark-up language (HTML). HTML provides a standard set of conventions, sometimes called “tags”, that define how a web page is to be displayed. Thus, when a user requests a server to display a web page, the browser sends that request to the server computer system to transfer the appropriate HTML programming document that defines the web page. When that HTML programming document is received by the client computer system, the browser then displays the web page as defined by the HTML programming document. The HTML programming document contains the various protocols or tags that control the display of the text graphics and other features on that web page. Among other things that may be displayed on the web page are the uniform resource locators of other web pages which allows a user to immediately link from that web page through the Internet to the remote web page identified by that URL.
The World Wide Web is especially useful for conducting various types of electronic information exchanges, including many types of commercial displays. Web servers and web pages can advertise and sell products, deliver information about products, store and retrieve information, among many other uses. The particular programming for HTML documents is well established and understood to one of skill in the art in constructing and administering web sites and web pages. For this reason, the exchange and storage of information, be it a computer generated order for an item, computer generated dialog, or computer storage of documents, are easily accomplished through the World Wide Web using browser and HTML documents.
The Internet operates ordinarily by breaking a communication into discreet packets of information and then sending these packets out on the Internet to the destination identified by the URL. These packets may travel through different channels to reach their ultimate destination. In doing so, they may pass through a number of computers along the way. Therefore, sensitive information can be intercepted and viewed at the computers that serve as “way stations” as the packets of information find their way to their ultimate destination identified by the URL. Consequently, information transmitted over the Internet is frequently encrypted or coded. If encrypted or coded information is intercepted, then unless the code can be broken or the encryption scheme deciphered, the information contained in the communication is unreadable hence, useless to the person who intercepted it. Moreover, some web sites may themselves contain sensitive information or valuable information which the owners of those web sites may not wish to make generally available. Consequently, access to these web sites are limited to those with appropriate passwords or other “keys” that will allow one to enter the web site and make use of the information displayed there.